Oct 31, 2012

American gender relations have undergone big changes in the last century and a half—and The Atlantic has chronicled some of the major milestones along the way.

In the early winter months of 1859, an essay in The Atlantic noted that a subtle yet seismic shift had taken place in the United States.

"In this country, the vast changes of the last twelve years are already a
matter of history," it read. "State after State has ushered into legal
existence one half of the population within its borders. Every Free
State in the American Union, ... has conceded to married women, in some
form, the separate control of property."

Back then, some considered it almost treasonous that a married woman
could hold the same property rights as her husband. 153 years later, a
discussion of why married women couldn't have everything married men had
arose in the wake of Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic cover story "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."

It's been a remarkable century and a half for gender rights in the
United States. From the 1859 essay "Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?"
to Hanna Rosin's "The End of Men" and Slaughter's "Why Women Still Can't
Have It All," The Atlantic has chronicled the changing dynamics between women and men in America. Here are some highlights: ...

Tomorrow’s Youth Organization based in Nablus, on the West Bank, helps promising new women's businesses survive.

... TYO’s Women’s Incubation Services for Entrepreneurs (WISE) brought
back six businesses that had developed a foundation from their initial
women’s entrepreneurship program—Fostering Women Entrepreneurs in Nablus, and recruited nine additional female entrepreneurs by running advertisements in local newspapers, radio, and on Facebook.
The requirements were simple—businesses had to have a foundation or
business plan already completed, and had to be based in the northern
West Bank.

Candidates who responded to ads underwent two rounds of
interviews, designed not only to determine the entrepreneur's
eligibility for the program, but also to assess her strengths and needs
moving forward. Partnering with the Small Enterprise Center,
TYO sent their final 15 candidates to one-on-one coaching early in the
process in order to set their women up for targeted support and success.
Additionally, the year-long incubation project will provide marketing,
access to capital, and financial-growth trainings, as well as business
English and social-media training facilitated by last year’s Palestinian
TechWomen delegation.

When
planning for an incubation center, TYO kept in mind that the
conservative culture in Palestine often limits businesswomen’s
opportunities to participate in meetings, classes, conferences, and
other development programs. Furthermore, the psychosocial environment at times leaves women discouraged when they do not see immediate growth or results in their efforts to propel their businesses forward.

By planning programming in the mornings and weekends, TYO is able to
work around many of the restrictions on women’s mobility. Not only that,
but establishing the TYO center in Nablus as the base for WISE, they
are able to fill a gap by being the only business incubation center in the northern West Bank geared to women, and provide support to women who may not be able to travel all the way to Ramallah,
where such programs are more common. By serving as a support system to
the businesswomen, Samin and Inas Badawi—a local Palestinian—provide
examples of female-to-female support that is uncommon in Palestine, and
try to foster the same sense of encouragement between the women they
work with.

It is this model of American-Palestinian cooperation
that sets TYO’s WISE program apart from other entrepreneurship trainings
in Palestine. ...

Bono has learned much about music over more than three decades with U2.
But alongside that has been a lifelong lesson in campaigning — the
activist for poverty reduction in Africa spoke frankly on Friday about
how his views about philanthropy had now stretched to include an
appreciation for capitalism.

The Irish singer and co-founder of ONE,
a campaigning group that fights poverty and disease in Africa, said it
had been “a humbling thing for me” to realize the importance of
capitalism and entrepreneurialism in philanthropy, particularly as
someone who “got into this as a righteous anger activist with all the
cliches.”

“Job creators and innovators are just the key, and aid is just a
bridge,” he told an audience of 200 leading technology entrepreneurs and
investors at the F.ounders tech
conference in Dublin. “We see it as startup money, investment in new
countries. A humbling thing was to learn the role of commerce.” ...

Poverty is not first and foremost an absence wealth. Poverty is
exclusion from networks of productivity and exchange. Inclusion into
those networks is the solution.

Economic development has three stages, much like triage. Stage 1 is
relief. The bleeding has to be stopped and the patient has to be
stabilized. Stage 2 is rehabilitation. Wounds need to be healed and the
person needs to be nurtured to health. Stage 3 is development. Assisting
a relatively healthy patient toward greater health and flourishing.

In the face of a natural disaster like a tsunami or a hurricane, we
must do relief. Water, food, clothing, shelter, and medical care are
paramount. Once the situation is stabilized comes a time of rebuilding
basic infrastructure. But if we want to help beyond relief and
rehabilitation, the focus must be upon expanding inclusion in networks
of productivity and exchange. All three stages are necessary but all
three have a different focus.

The propensity of Western advocates for the poor is to see most
instances of poverty as problems needing relief, with maybe some cases
needing rehabilitation. Economic development isn't even on the radar.
(And in fact, words like "markets" and "development" are voiced with
derision in some quarters.) But at any given moment, very few poor
nations are in need of significant relief, some could use rehabilitative
work, and most need economic development. We treat countries needing
economic development as victims needing relief. The consequences can be
devastating.

When
aid grows to be about 7% of nation's economy a transformation begins to
take place. National leaders turn their attention away from their
domestic business sector. They feel less and less accountabile to making
their domestic economy work or to being responsive to their
constituents. Their energies turn toward the aid giver. The mission
becomes retention and expansion of aid.

Yet Western advocates talk in terms of the West has X% of the world's
wealth while sub-Saharan African countries have only Y%. Solution? Give
wealth to equalize the difference and "relieve" the poverty. As Bono
has learned, this "relief" orientation is not only not the answer, it is
a contributor to sustained impoverishment. Development and expansion of
networks of productivity and exchange are the answer.

Oct 30, 2012

RJS is a Chemistry professor who is a a regular blogger at Scot McKnight's Jesus Creedblog. It is a fascinating take on the Romans 8 passage where Paul talks about all creation groaning. She writes:

... Most of the commentaries on Romans 8 I’ve looked at trace the reference back to Genesis 3.
This includes John Stott, F.F. Bruce, and N.T. Wright, scholars for
whom I have a great deal of respect. So I put forth my thoughts with a
bit of caution, but it seems unlikely to me that Paul’s thought was
fixed on Genesis 3 as the source of his reflection on creation in Romans 8.
Rather, it seems more likely that his primary source was the prophets
and the whole of Israel’s story. Images of the earth groaning because of
the sins of Israel are common in the prophets. ...

and

... In the imagery of the prophets there is a
curse on the earth. But this curse is not the result of Adam. It also
is not a change in the physical nature of the world. It does not
reflect some cosmic change in the laws of physics worked by God in
response to sin. In a figurative and physical sense, the earth groans
result of the covenant unfaithfulness of Israel. Romans 8
turns this dark image around to an eager expectation of the renewal that
comes through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ,
according to Scripture, and thereby through the renewed children of
God, transformed by the working of the grace of God.

I don’t put any of this forward as a final answer – but think it is a topic worth some thought and discussion.

This is part of larger discussion that sees Genesis 1 talking about God ordering creation and Genesis 2 as talking about the formation of Israel. I'm curious to know what the theological brain trust of Kronicle readers think. What do you think?

In a profound chapter in A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture,
Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor look at how advertising has shaped
contemporary society. The authors offer “Ten Commandments of
Advertising,” all of which point to an overarching question that people
in this (and every) culture ask: “What is it to be fully human?”

“This is the question that advertising seeks to answer, a
question that was one the pursuit of philosophers and theologians.
Advertising is an incredibly powerful form of pop culture that
influences us on levels far deeper than getting us to choose certain
products. Life choices are part of today’s world of advertising and
consumption. ‘The glory of God,’ Irenaeus wrote, ‘is a human being fully
alive.’ In contemporary society, to be fully human is to shop.
Advertising offers us ways to be alive, ways to be human.” (p. 84)

Certainly, there are ads that are manipulative and appeal to the
baser aspects of human depravity in order to sell products. But
advertising, at its best, appeals to our desire to know who we are, to
celebrate life, to find meaning in being human. ...

I especially liked this statement:

Christianity needs to “re-message” itself as a faith that embraces the
joy of God restoring humanity and encourages celebration. The
restoration of all things is in our future. We await the return of Jesus
Christ with great anticipation. What are we doing in preparation?

The primary vision of the church today, liberal or conservative, is to offer people meaning and transcendence by extracting them out of the daily routines of life, rather than equipping people to see transcendence in those daily routines. We do it in the form of therapeutic pietism or in the form of activism to change the world. And if you are really "spiritual" you will enter "full-time ministry" to do these things.

(Bob wrote a great post here. He recently began (re)integrate, which is devoted to addressing just the kind of issues the post raises. Be sure to check the website.)

Where have you seen examples of the church equipping people to see transcendence in the routines of life? How might we do a better job of celebrating life?

When you adjust food prices for inflation, you might be surprised to
learn that your dollars go further today compared to 30 years ago -- for
most products at least. Don't believe it? See for yourself with this
grocery shopping simulator that reveals how much your grocery bill
varies over the past three decades.

How it works

You start with $35.46. That's the average weekly grocery budget for an
individual on a thrifty plan for a nutritious diet, according to Census data.
Of course, $35.46 in 2012 is not worth the same as in the past thanks
to inflation. In 2002, that amount (adjusted for inflation) is the
equivalent of $27.57. In 1992, it's $21.50. And in 1982, it's $14.79.

Oct 29, 2012

A new grandmother catches a glimpse of what parenting looks like today.

Deborah Fallows spent two weeks with her infant grandson and that caused her to reflect on her own life as a woman trying to navigate what it meant to "have it all."

... I spent lots and lots of at-home time raising kids some 30 years ago.
That was during the very first wave of honest discussion of home vs.
work. I planted my stake then with an article in The Washington Monthly called "Mothers and Other Strangers," which was bannered on the cover as "The Myth of the Superwoman," followed by a book, A Mother's Work.
I argued that raising children full-time was a legitimate choice, not a
capitulation to falling short or failure, and that no matter which road
women took, there would be costs to pay. (And yes, yes, I did talk
about the luxury of having a choice.)

From my book in 1985:

My desires and feelings about the way I should raise
children and be a mother suddenly seemed to place me at sharp, and
unnecessary, odds with the women's movement, whose campaigns to offer
women the chance for stronger and more independent lives were, along
with the civil rights movements, the most important social developments
of my lifetime. I thought of the women's movement as my friend, and
still do; yet its positions on motherhood and child rearing made it seem
as if I would be failing the movement if I took the steps I thought
necessary to care for my children.

A torrent of response followed. The mailman delivered bins and bins
of typed or handwritten heartfelt letters, an image that now rings as
quaint compared with the barrage of easy, instant digital responses. I
was embraced or vilified, quietly and publicly, more or less equally, by
both sides....

... But it also seems to me that the emphasis has changed. It used to focus
more on "What does this mean to the kids?" and now it is, "What does
this mean to women's careers?" ...

... So, that history established, you can imagine that I was very
interested to time-travel and try out modern life with children. Here's
what I learned, in three parts: the sociologically interesting, the
surprising, and the highly improved.

Dads. I should have seen this one coming. There was no missing
the appearance of more young dads with kids at the playgrounds, in the
grocery stores, on mid-day outings, or the announcements of paternal
leave and dads' support groups over the last generation. But old habits
die hard, and when I was laying in supplies for the baby visit, I
unthinkingly asked our son to ask our daughter-in-law what size diapers
and what kind of bottles I should get. Without missing a beat, he
replied, "Size 3 Pampers Swaddlers and Medela bottles."

My first reaction was: a misstep by me. My second reaction was: He's a good dad. ...

Language. One of the things I love about my academic training in
linguistics is that knowing about language often pops up as something
useful or revealing. Here's what took me by surprise in this case as I
strolled around our neighborhood: Moms and babysitters and nannies, who
used to push strollers in pairs and chat between themselves, now push
strollers alone and talk into mid-air. ...

Technology. A quick catalogue of support, gear, and technology for daily life with kids. ...

... The accumulation of changes is staggering. I found that once I had
mastered the array of snaps, levers, buttons, straps, and assembly
routines, the total effect made for a much easier and more versatile
texture of everyday life with children. My personal favorite is improved
diaper effectiveness. I can imagine how digital resources, which have
transformed my adult life, would transform life as a parent.

Two final lessons learned. The first was trivial but fun: I didn't
need to worry about missing the gym classes. Tending a one-year-old is a
total-body workout and bonus weight-loss program. It builds strong
biceps and quads, and it melts away 2 pounds per week. Guaranteed.

The second was delightful: Occasionally in life, the chance to
experience something essential and exquisite comes along. For me, this
time with Jack was one of them. Time stopped and everything else was
eclipsed.

Any grandparents that can relate to her story? What changes do you see?

And that's something of a challenge for the collaborative encyclopedia going forward

For about the last five years, Wikipedia has had trouble getting and keeping new volunteer editors. The foundation behind Wikipedia has made building up the editor base a major goal, and is attacking it from all angles, such as encouraging a culture that is friendlier to newbies, creating an easier sign-up page, and making the editing process more intutitive.

But what if the decline in engagement has little to do with culture or the design of the site? What if, instead, it's that there's just less for new Wikipedians to do?

It may seem impossible for an encyclopedia of everything to ever near completion, but at least for the major articles on topics like big wars, important historical figures, central scientific concepts, the English-language Wikipedia's pretty well filled out. (There is, of course, room for improvement in articles that have received less attention, but that is a different, yet still very important, set of challenges.) There's always going to be some tidying -- better citations, small updates, new links, cleaner formatting -- but the bulk of the work, the actual writing and structuring of the articles, has already been done. "There are more and more readers of Wikipedia, but they have less and less new to add," writes historian and Wikipedia editor Richard Jensen in the latest issue of The Journal of Military History. ...

Six Italian scientists were sentenced to six years in prison last week for not giving the public sufficient warning of the L'Aquila earthquake. The CNN video is included below. The scientists are appealing the decision but the fact that this case occurred at all is sparking debate about science and public policy.

Ethan Siegel at The Atlantic offers some thoughts on the challenges we face. We frequently make our estimates about the future based on repetitive experiences from the past:

This is a fabulous example of a pre-scientific prediction!
I’ve taken information from very, very similar situations that I’ve
experienced before, I know — looking back — how those previous
situations turned out, and so I can infer how this current situation is
likely to turn out. This is something we do all the time in our lives,
and something we’ve done frequently throughout history. The phrase Red Sky at Night, Sailor’s Delight
didn’t come about because we understood the science behind the next
day’s weather and the properties of the atmosphere the night before, it
came about because when we observed phenomenon A (the red sky at night),
it was very often followed by phenomenon B (good sailing weather the
next day).

We use this all the time in our lives ...

Science is different:

Sometimes, this type of pre-scientific prediction is the best we can do. If we can make this into a truly scientific prediction,
we stand to do much better, but it’s a much more difficult task. A
truly scientific prediction requires the following three things:

that the scientific theory that governs your phenomenon is completely understood,

the conditions that will affect the possible outcome(s) are known and understood in their entirety, and

that you have enough computing power to figure out what the outcome is going to be.

In addition, because measurements are imperfect (and sometimes physical laws aren’t 100% predictive), you are also going to have a quantifiable uncertainty associated with your scientific prediction.

So, depending on the topic, scientists' ability to offer meaningful guidance to the public will vary. But if we are to translate science into meaningful action, we also need at least three other elements present in society:

We can speak intelligently about what the outcome will be in terms of probabilities and uncertainties, but this also requires a few things that are far from given:

Scientists who can communicate these results clearly and effectively,

A media / government that can understand that information, make
reasonable and effective policies based on that information, and
communicate these results to the populace, and

A populace that’s scientifically literate enough to understand
what’s communicated to them and act in accordance with those
recommendations.

This ought to be one of the main goals of science, as it’s one of the most important services that science can perform for a society.

Toward the end of his essay he writes:

You do the world a disservice when you scapegoat scientists
for a disaster they could not predict and an incompetent government
official they could not control. We now live in a world where we jail scientists for failing to clean up the government’s miscommunication about a disaster they could not predict, while we simultaneously accuse them of fear-mongering for the impending disasters that good science does predict.

If you want to know what’s going to happen in the future with any sort of accuracy, you need science.
It’s the only thing that’s ever worked, and the more we do it, the
better we get at it. This means we need to make the world safe for
scientists to do science, we need to treat the science being done with
the respect it deserves, and we need to improve and encourage
communication between scientists and the public.

Anthony Giddens wrote about these challenges in Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. Increasingly, our challenges are far more complex than our time-honored heuristic decision-making models can handle. In the face of an impending disaster (Giddens uses the Mad Cow epidemic as an example), if scientists don't warn strongly enough, then they could be vilified like the recently convicted Italian scientists were. If they warn too strongly and nothing happens, or if their strong warnings lead to actions that prevent a disaster, then scientists can be labeled scaremongers ... the bad thing they predicted didn't happen.

There is no easy solution to the dilemma. I think one other element should be added to the discussion. It probably falls under Siegel's comments about scientists communicating clearly. Many of the problems we face require buy-in by the masses. As soon as scientists become to tightly connected with a particular political agenda they risk having scientific information collapsed into a partisan football to be kicked around rather than science becoming a guiding light to shape policy. Scientists should be very slow to connect scientific information to political agendas and resist being taken captive for political ends.

What to do you think about the Italian court decision? What challenges do you see for science as it relates to public policy?

Oct 27, 2012

Each week I spend considerable time scanning headlines as I look for stories to blog about at the Kruse Kronicle. I clip them into an Evernote Notebook and usually twice a day I select one or two to link and discuss. A number of interesting stories never make it on to the blog.

So this week I'm beginning what I hope will be a regular Saturday feature. Each Saturday I will post links I did not use the previous week. For now I will call it "Saturday Links." Happy clicking!

3. Icon of the American Libertarian movement, Murray Rothbard, once asked, "Why won't the left acknowledge the difference between deserving poor and
undeserving poor. Why support the feckless, lazy & irresponsible?" Chris Dillow gives a libertarian response affirming the need to Support the undeserving poor.

"I can easily imagine my graph in a Julian Simon or Steven Pinker chapter
on human progress and the decline in violence. Even though I have no
philosophical objection to the death penalty, it's hard not to interpret
this 400-year pattern as a strong sign of human betterment."

Oct 26, 2012

Hawley recounts the history of politics and religion in the past few decades. He says that the agenda of the Christian Right was to convert both society and government. He writes:

It’s far from clear that restoring Christian social authority is an appropriate aim of politics in
the first place. The conversionist approach tends to confuse the
distinct missions of church and state—is it really the role of
government, for instance, to promote “Christian values” or refurbish
America’s Christian heritage?—even as it fails to provide much guidance
as to what, exactly, government is supposed to be doing.

He delves into what it means to say the Kingdom of God is here and now, not just in the future. Scripture teaches that Christ is Lord over all and that government is ordained by God to serve a purpose. If we are to work and pray for "your Kingdom come, your will be done" (my framing, not his), then we will want government to move toward something that reflects Kingdom justice. He writes:

These things together tell us something quite important about what
government is for, and what Christians should be trying to do with it
and with politics. Government serves Christ’s kingdom rule; this is its
purpose. And Christians’ purpose in politics should be to advance the
kingdom of God—to make it more real, more tangible, more present. Or
should I say, to immanentize the eschaton.

Now let me just say,
advancing God’s kingdom does not mean abandoning constitutional
government in favor of theocracy or using the state to convert
non-believers. On the contrary, a kingdom-inspired approach to politics
would give up trying to Christianize the state altogether. The reason is
found in the state’s unique mission. God’s mandates for state and
church are distinct, as Romans 13, to take one example, makes abundantly
clear. While the church is to proclaim the salvation of God in Christ,
the state is charged with keeping order, punishing wrongdoers—and more
broadly, with securing the conditions of life that allow individuals to
realize their gifts and callings: in a word, to flourish. Put another
way, the mission of the state is to secure justice. Justice, as it turns
out, is the social manifestation of the kingdom.

He concludes with this:

What might a kingdom-inspired agenda take as priorities today? To
start, a kingdom focus suggests Christians ought to be working not
merely for a bigger economy, but for a better one. The
number of low- and unskilled workers in the labor force has declined
precipitously under President Obama, but the truth is, the trend is more
than forty years in the making. Too many workers with less than a
college education simply cannot find work in today’s marketplace—or
cannot find work sufficient to support themselves or a family. This must
change. Labor, and the ability to earn one’s own way, is central to
dignity and indeed, to vocation. Christians should seek to broaden the
private economy to include more individuals in remunerative labor.

A
kingdom agenda would also focus on expanding opportunities for the poor
and marginalized, with better primary and secondary schools, for
example, and expanded access to vocational training. Of course, the most
vulnerable among us are the unborn, and just as the Mosaic law forbade
abortion and protected the rights of the marginalized, so
kingdom-focused Christians today should continue their efforts to
protect the unborn in law. But they should go further. Pro-choice
advocates have long argued that access to abortion is necessary to
guarantee women equal standing in society. Embracing the kingdom call to
equality, where “there is neither male nor female, Greek nor Jew,”
Christians should work to ensure that this is not true. Women must be
welcomed as full and equal participants in society as women­—including
as mothers—and not required to behave as men in order to achieve social
standing. To the extent workplace mores and even laws must change in
order to make this ideal a reality, Christians should work to change
them.

This is the merest sketch of what a kingdom-focused agenda
might mean, but here is the point. Rather than seek to Christianize the
state and use it to restore a Christian social consensus, believing
citizens should call the state to its true purpose—to serve justice, and
by extension, the kingdom of God. This is Christians’ role in politics,
and their service, both to the Lord and to their fellow man. For the
principles of the kingdom and the social life it envisions are not for
Christians only, but for all people. The kingdom life is the common good. And Christians should offer it winsomely, creatively, heartily once again.

It is a thought provoking piece. You may not agree with his specifics in the closing paragraphs but what do you think about working to advance the Kingdom through the state without seeking to convert the state, or using the state as means to achieve conversion? Does Hawley's model still compromise Christian witness by becoming to entangled with the state? What are you thinking?

Open source shouldn't just stop at the world of software. In fact, more and more manufacturers are warming up to the cause.

FORTUNE -- The term "open source" was first coined in response to
Netscape's January 1998 announcement that the company would make freely
available the source code for its web browser, Navigator. Since then,
the philosophies of universal access and free redistribution of source
code have revolutionized the software industry.

While we have seen how open source communities can foster creativity
and collaboration in software (think of the Android app store), open
source has not ventured too far beyond this space. This is partly
because software is inherently modular, instantly accessible from
anywhere, and easily altered.

Yet open source ideas have tremendous potential beyond
software. All you need to create a successful open source community are
participants who both contribute to, as well as benefit from, shared
content. Such networks of transparency, collaboration, and trust can be
tremendously beneficial in other industries as well, from
pharmaceuticals to manufactured goods. ...

... Although the open source model has not yet been broadly applied to
manufactured goods, there are promising emerging examples --
particularly in the not for profit sector. One nonprofit group, Open
Source Ecology, is experimenting with ways to cheaply construct from
scratch over 50 crucial machines, from bakery ovens to back hoes, with
basic materials. Founder Marcin Jakubowski publishes all the blueprints
and schematics for each piece of his Global Village Construction Set
(GVCS) on a Wiki for contributors from all over the world to access and
tweak. Groups throughout the country have developed blueprints for Open
Source Ecology, while machines are prototyped and improved on the Factor e Farm
in rural Missouri. According to the group's website, 12 of the 50
machines are in their prototyping and documentation phase, including a
microtractor, backhoe, and CNC circuit mill. Through this construction
kit, Open Source Ecology aims to lower barriers to entry for farming,
building, and manufacturing in rural communities, urban neighborhoods in
need of renovation, and developing nations. ...

Despite early signs of success, there are, admittedly, real challenges
to implementing open source principles to for-profit manufacturing. ...

Income inequality is a big topic these days, but there are some who argue that income inequality data doesn't tell the whole picture. Income data typically uses pre-tax and pre-transfer income (meaning people at the top have less than it appears because of the taxes they pay, and the people at the bottom have more because of assistance they recieve.) There are other factors that muddy the waters as well.

The American Enterprise Institute released a study last summer that focuses on consumption differences. Yes, I know many of my readers will roll their eyes at AEI. I'll say that I've seen similar arguements made in peer-reviewd articles. Here is a piece in the New York Times four years ago written by two Fed Reserve folks making similar arguements, You Are What You Spend. The AEI report is A new measure of consumption inequality. Below is the executive summary, which can be found at the AEI website.

Does seeing inequality in terms of consumption clarify anything? What are the advantages or disadvantages of looking at things this way?

Executive Summary

In recent times, the debate surrounding middle-class welfare has
tended to focus on the issue of income inequality. In a popular 2006
paper, economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez use tax return data
from the Internal Revenue Service to suggest that income inequality has
widened significantly over the period 1913 to 2010.[1] Another
frequently cited statistic is that in 2010, approximately half of all
reported income went to the top 10 percent of earners.

We argue in this paper that income data are not the best measure of
overall welfare. What matters for household well-being is consumption,
since households are better able to smooth consumption rather than
income over their lifetime. To that end, we use two alternative sources
of data to assess changes in consumption inequality.Our first source,
the Consumer Expenditure (CEX) Survey, shows aggregated changes in
consumption expenditures for households at all levels of the income
distribution. Using these data, we find that consumption inequality has
increased only marginally since the 1980s. Further, consumption
inequality narrows in periods of recessions, such as during the
2007–2009 recession. We also construct Gini coefficients from the CEX
data and find that they have remained relatively stable over time,
suggesting that the inequality has not widened significantly.

The second data source we use
is the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), which allows us to
assess consumption inequality in durable goods. Consumption of durable
goods is recorded less well in the CEX data but is important in
thoroughly assessing consumption inequality. The RECS survey includes
questions on household use of appliances such as microwaves,
dishwashers, computers, and printers. Simple tabulations of these data
across years suggest that a higher percentage of low-income households
is able to afford and possess these items. In addition, the quality of
dwelling spaces has improved and more low-income households have heating
and air conditioning today than at any time in the past.

To see if these differences are statistically significant, we present
regression tables showing the likelihood that a household owns any of
these items. The results suggest a significant narrowing of the gap
between low-income and other households in certain durable-goods items,
such as color televisions, microwaves, refrigerators, and air
conditioners. In other items, like computers and printers, the gap was
small to begin with but widened as usage of these items became more
widespread and cost of these items declined. However, in recent times,
even this gap has narrowed. For a third category of items, including
clothes washers, clothes dryers, and dishwashers, the gap has tended to
be fairly stable over time. Even in a statistical sense, there is a
trend toward narrowing the consumption gap between low-income and other
households.

Note

1. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective,” AEA Papers and Proceedings: Measuring and Interpreting Trends in Economic Inequality 96, no. 2 (May 2006): 200–205, http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/piketty-saezAEAPP06.pdf
(accessed June 6, 2012). For updated data, see Emmanuel Saez, “Striking
It Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States” (working
paper, University of California–Berkeley, March 2, 2012), http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2010.pdf (accessed June 6, 2012).

Oct 25, 2012

If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?

... Bill Joy's question deserves therefore not to be ignored: Does the
future need us? By this I mean to ask, if machines are capable of doing
almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? I have been getting
various answers to this question, but I find none satisfying.

A typical answer to my raising this question is to tell me that I am a
Luddite. (Luddism is defined as distrust or fear of the inevitable
changes brought about by new technology.) This is an ad hominem attack
that does not deserve a serious answer.

A more thoughtful answer is that technology has been destroying jobs
since the start of the Industrial Revolution, yet new jobs are
continually created. The AI Revolution, however, is different than the
Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century machines competed with human
brawn. Now machines are competing with human brain. Robots combine brain
and brawn. We are facing the prospect of being completely out-competed
by our own creations. Another typical answer is that if machines will do
all of our work, then we will be free to pursue leisure activities. The
economist John Maynard Keynes addressed this issue already in 1930,
when he wrote, "The increase of technical efficiency has been taking
place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption."
Keynes imagined 2030 as a time in which most people worked only 15 hours
a week, and would occupy themselves mostly with leisure activities.

I do not find this to be a promising future. First, if machines can
do almost all of our work, then it is not clear that even 15 weekly
hours of work will be required. Second, I do not find the prospect of
leisure-filled life appealing. I believe that work is essential to human
well-being. Third, our economic system would have to undergo a radical
restructuring to enable billions of people to live lives of leisure.
Unemployment rate in the US is currently under 9 percent and is
considered to be a huge problem.

Finally, people tell me that my
concerns apply only to a future that is so far away that we need not
worry about it. I find this answer to be unacceptable. 2045 is merely a
generation away from us. We cannot shirk responsibility from concerns
for the welfare of the next generation. ...

Vardi's point?

We cannot blindly pursue the goal of machine intelligence without pondering its consequences.

One of the challenges of creative destruction is that we can
see what is being destroyed but it is exceedingly difficult to see what is
being created. As we have moved through the industrial era into the modern age,
this fear that change was about impoverish the masses has been a recurring
them. Futurists like Gene Rodenberry saw a day where most goods would be so
plentiful or easily created that there would be little need for money or
possessions. You wouldn’t need a job as a means to survival.

What do you think? Do Yardi’s concerns worry you? Or is the
arrival of AI a godsend?

NEW YORK (AP) -- Scientists in Oregon
have created embryos with genes from one man and two women, using a
provocative technique that could someday be used to prevent babies from
inheriting certain rare incurable diseases.

The researchers at Oregon Health &
Sciences University said they are not using the embryos to produce
children, and it is not clear when or even if this technique will be put
to use. But it has already stirred a debate over its risks and ethics
in Britain, where scientists did similar work a few years ago.

The British
experiments, reported in 2008, led to headlines about the possibility
someday of babies with three parents. But that's an overstatement. The
DNA from the second woman amounts to less than 1 percent of the embryo's
genes, and it isn't the sort that makes a child look like Mom or Dad.
The procedure is simply a way of replacing some defective genes that
sabotage the normal workings of cells.

The
British government is asking for public comment on the technology before
it decides whether to allow its use in the future. One concern it cites
is whether such DNA alteration could be an early step down a slippery
slope toward "designer babies" - ordering up, say, a petite, blue-eyed
girl or tall, dark-haired boy. ...

MIT Professor Donald Sadoway’s lectures were good enough to convince Bill Gates to invest in his startup called Liquid Metal Battery. Now you can watch a glimpse of a mini lecture by Sadoway, because the TED conference just released Sadoway’s 15 minute TED talk. It’s worth a watch!

A report by the World Bank found that easing fees, rules, and border restrictions could help Africa's food crisis, and could also lead to economic growth.

Africa could avoid food shortages if it reduces the tangled web of
rules, fees and high costs strangling regional food trade and by putting
large swathes of uncultivated land to productive use, a World Bank
report said on Wednesday.

Just 5 percent of Africa's cereal imports are now provided by African
farmers, according to the report released on the eve of an African
Union summit on agriculture and trade in Ethiopia.

"Too often
borders get in the way of getting food to homes and communities which
are struggling with too little to eat," said Makhtar Diop, World Bank
vice president for Africa.

The bank estimated that 19 million people are in danger of hunger and
malnutrition in West Africa's Sahel region. Yet, removing cross-border
restrictions could help avoid food crises if farmers were allowed to
trade more easily with each other and get food to communities facing
shortages.

In addition, the World Bank estimated that fewer
restrictions on food trade could generate an estimated $20 billion in
annual earnings for African governments.

Food trade barriers also
increase the cost to the consumer and the farmer, the World Bank said.
For example, farmers on holdings in Africa who sell surplus harvest
typically receive less than 20 percent of the consumer price of their
produce, with the rest being eaten up by various transaction costs and
post harvest losses.

"This clearly limits the incentive to produce for the market," the World Bank said. ...

Oct 24, 2012

Energy and green energy were hot topics during the presidential debates, but climate change didn't come up once. The candidates may be avoiding the issue because voters don't want to hear a difficult message.

... "National elections should be a time when our nation considers the
great challenges and opportunities the next President will face," opines
the website ClimateSilence.org,
a project of Forecast the Facts and Friends of the Earth Action aimed
at pushing the issue into campaigns. "But the climate conversation of
2012 has been defined by a deafening silence."

The candidates talked about energy and green energy, but always with regard to jobs, never about the climate. Why?

The
easy answer is that it's not good politics. What candidate wants to
talk about emissions when voters are worried about jobs? Who wants to
tackle carbon taxes when many Americans are struggling to pay the taxes
they already owe?

The deeper question is: Do Americans want their candidates to talk about climate change? The answer seems to be: No.

It's
probably not climate skepticism that's the main barrier here. Polls
show that over time Americans are increasingly convinced by the science
showing that the climate is warming, and they do see a link with human
activity. The ranks of the "climate deniers" are thinning, albeit
slowly.

The bigger challenge may be that to many voters the problem seems all too real and unsolvable – something to fear because we can't fix it. ...

Two other factors may also point to why, despite a growing
number of people believing climate change is a problem, they are not motivated.
First, recent reports that there has been no significant warming in the past
sixteen years (The
REALLY inconvenient truths about global warming) decreases a sense of urgency.
A plateau doesn't necessarily invalidate climate change models (as models have
never predicted a linear ascent) but it can dissipate a sense of urgency.
Second, is this graph:

This wasn’t anticipated. A purpose of the Kyoto Accords was
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. We are there with the
biggest contributor to the problem. All that is to say, the dynamics have
shifted. Finding the sweet spot between apathy and overwhelming citizens to the
point of demoralization has been a challenge for those who champion the need
for changes.

What do you think? Why was the topic not debated? Do you think CSM article is offering a good analysis?

(And, by the way, since this is a controversial topic, let me highlight my newly minted comment policy you now see linked at the top of the column to the right. Long-time commenters here do such a great job. I'm hoping we can preserve that tradition as new folks join in.)

Many Christian college students preparing to graduate feel as if their entire life rests on the answer to this question.

During my senior year at James Madison University, I watched plans to
become doctors and business leaders dissolve as many of my friends gave
up their dreams for "full-time ministry." I respected their decisions
and wondered if I could find the same significance in my "ordinary"
calling. As they began raising support to join campus ministry staff or
church plant teams, I applied for internships in Washington, D.C., and
tried to convince myself that my vocation would be equally meaningful.

I found some repose from the leaders in my church. They regularly
emphasized the importance of secular work in building God's kingdom. I
learned that I would find significance in any job, as long as I:

Exemplified Christ's love

Shared my faith with my co-workers

Donated a portion of my income to ministry

But I found this answer only half-satisfying. It explained how I
should interact with co-workers and steward my money, but what about
the actual work I was going to be doing?

I came across an article in Relevant Magazine recently, called "Kingdom Living from the Middle of Normal."
I was interested to see if author Kelli Trujillo's insights were any
deeper than what I had heard in church. Sadly, they weren't.

So I guess the message is ... my office job means absolutely
nothing? While stewardship and charity are responsibilities of the
Christian life, none of these points have anything to do with the
"seemingly mundane" job itself. Trujillo nearly implies secular work can
only contribute to the Kingdom of God in areas outside the
nine-to-five, since the secular really isn't directly "God-related."

If I had read this article my senior year of college and believed it,
I would have immediately deserted my "ordinary" calling to jump on the
"full-time ministry" bandwagon. Troubled after reading this article, I
wondered if Christians had lost a true understanding of work as it
relates to doing God's work.

A few days later, ...

Read the whole thing. Elise Amyx is talking about the problem from an Evangelical perspective but Mainliners do similar things. Justice advocacy and compassionate ministries are what count as "real" ministry. There is no real theology of work and daily life.

The New Rice for Africa variety has become part of the debate over
whether a Green Revolution is the best approach to ensure food security
in Africa. ...

JAMBUR, The Gambia—The dissemination of the high-yielding New Rice
for Africa (NERICA) seeds has sparked contention that is a microcosm for
a central debate in global agricultural development: does Africa need
its own Green Revolution, an effort that 50 years ago saw dramatic
productivity increases through the use of new crop technologies in Asia
and Latin America?

NERICA, developed by 2004 World Food Prize winner Dr. Monty Jones,
is being promoted by the Africa Rice Center mainly in West African
countries where rice is a staple food. It is a cross between an Asian
variety, responsible for the high yield, and an African variety, which
ensures its local adaptability.

West African governments have touted NERICA as a hallmark of a new
Green Revolution and as a path to boosting rice self-sufficiency,
especially after the 2008 food price spike exposed the dangers of import
dependence. On the other side, advocates of “food sovereignty”—centered
on farmers’ control over food systems—have voiced strong opposition.
The advocacy organization GRAIN has labeled NERICA a “trap for small farmers”
who will become vulnerable to expensive chemical fertilizers and seeds,
a situation widely cited by critics of the 1960s Green Revolution.

What I’ve found in Jambur, which in 2002 became the first Gambian
village to access the new crop, is a much more nuanced picture, one that
in fact incorporates elements of each side of the debate. This suggests
what a tactical misstep it would be for food sovereignty loyalists to
completely remove themselves from engaging with a new variety just
because it has become embedded in the discourse of a new Green
Revolution. ...

How happy are you and why? This is a question I spend a fair amount of
time thinking about, not only as it applies to my own levels of
happiness, but also as it applies to my family, friends, and the people
who I work with. Since graduating with my master’s degree in positive psychology,
I’ve worked with and observed thousands of people in a wide variety of
settings, and happy people just flow with the groove of life in a unique
way. Here is what they do differently:

Here are her ten. Go to the article get more detail:

1) They build a strong social fabric.

2) They engage in activities that fit their strengths, values and lifestyle.

3) They practice gratitude.

4) They have an optimistic thinking style.

5) They know it’s good to do good.

6) They know that material wealth is only a very small part of the equation.

7) They develop healthy coping strategies.

8) They focus on health.

9) They cultivate spiritual emotions.

10) They have direction.

I particularly liked her George Burns quote at the beginning of the post:

"Happiness is having a large, caring, close-knit family in another city."

What do you think of the list? Anything you would add? Does this list make you unhappy? ;-)

... So, what do we do? One path forward for the nuclear industry is through the construction of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). SMRs are nuclear reactors that are intentionally designed to be less than 300-megawatts, or about one-third of the size of conventional large reactor. By making them small, they have several key benefits not available to large reactors. These issues are discussed at length in a
new American Security Project (ASP) report, “Small Modular Reactors: A Possible Path Forward for Nuclear Power.”

First, SMRs offer flexibility. Since they are small, they can be added to the electric grid incrementally. Slow incremental additions better match the slow energy demand growth in the United States, which is projected to be less than 1% per year. Utilities have little interest in building a huge nuclear reactor when demand is not rising quickly enough to justify the investment.

Second, SMRs are designed with several safety features that are an improvement over large reactors. By using simpler designs with fewer coolant pipes and components, the risk of a safety accident declines.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, SMRs have an advantage in cost over large reactors. While a typical large reactor can cost between $6 and $9 billion, an SMR has an estimated price tag of only $250 million for a 100-megawatt reactor. With smaller
upfront costs and shorter construction timeframes, utilities can get loans with lower interest rates.

Despite these advantages, no SMR has been constructed to date. Why isn’t the industry building SMRs right now? The biggest obstacle for SMRs is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has licensed no SMR design.

A second impediment is the lack of a track record on performance. Without an example to point to, the burden is on the nuclear industry to prove that the advantages of SMRs discussed above are indeed an improvement over conventional reactors. Until the first plant moves ahead, uncertainty remains.

A third problem is low natural gas prices. The nuclear industry remains bullish on their prospects over the long-term, and with assets that last 60 years, it is essential to not get swept up in the latest hype. However, low natural gas prices present real problems for industry, at least in the near-term. ...

Rising wages and shrinking export demand are forcing manufacturers to relocate to neighboring Southeast Asian nations and many that remain are seriously considering moving, a foreign trade official from the Ministry of Commerce said.

The official, who declined to be named, said that "nearly one-third of Chinese manufacturers of textiles, garments, shoes and hats" are now working "under growing pressure" and have moved all, or part, of their production outside China in what he called the great industry transfer.

Favored destinations are usually members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, especially Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia.

And in all likelihood, "the trend will continue" with more traditional labor-intensive manufacturers transferring production, he told China Daily. ...

According to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, from January to June the minimum wage was raised, on average, by 20 percent in 16 provinces.

The minimum wage in Shenzhen now stands at 1,500 yuan ($238) per month, setting the highest standard for the whole Chinese mainland.

Many developing countries in Southeast Asia have lower labor costs.

The monthly wage for manufacturing jobs in Vietnam was, on average, 600 yuan in 2011, equivalent to the level of 10 years ago in Dongguan, an industrial town in South China's Pearl River Delta....

...But lower costs in other countries could soon change, some said.

"The advantage (of labor and production costs) in Southeast Asian countries will only last for a few years," said Chen Jian, a general manager of a garment company headquartered in Foshan, on the Pearl River Delta.

"The trend is just like what happened some 10 years ago when many manufacturing industries in Hong Kong and Taiwan moved to the Pearl River Delta to chase cheap labor. But now you can see how much our labor costs have gone up."

For some time now I have been working on a series of bite sized books
on Kingdom or eschatological perspectives on mundane or ordinary life.
There is one on the Kingdom itself (Imminent Domain–Eerdmans), one on
worship (We Have Seen his Glory–Eerdmans), one on work (Work–
Eerdmans), one on money (Jesus and Money– Brazos Press), one on
spiritual formation (The Shared Christian Life– Abingdon), and finally
now one on ‘the Rest of Life’–Rest, Play, Eating, Studying, Relating
(including sexual relating). Each of these books are under 200 pages,
and intended to promote more serious theological and ethical reflection
on the things we do most of the time every single week.

What has
constantly amazed me in doing this series of books is how few
predecessors amongst Biblical scholars I have had in writing on several
of these subjects. It’s as if we are not talking about soteriology or
theology proper (the doctrine of God) or some forms of eschatology, then
we must not be doing theology or ethics. It’s strange. ...

AMEN!!! (Oppps. Did I yell that outloud.)

... The irony is
that this little 168 page book, like it’s predecessors, is all about
eschatology, or better said, taking an eschatological look at the
ordinary. The question being asked in answered in each of these books
is— What difference does it make if we view these ordinary things of
life in light of the already and not yet eschatological activity called
the Kingdom of God? My answeer, as you might imagine, is ‘much in every
way’. If we are seriously about our eschatology, both present and
future, this should absolutely change the way we view all these
subjects— worship viewed from the end backwards looks different, and so
does work, and money, and marriage, and rest, and play, and spiritual
formation etc. ...

Given the paramount importance of work in both liberal and socialist
economic and social theory, it is remarkable that in our world dominated
by work a serious crisis in work had to strike before church bodies
paid much attention to the problem of human work. Theologians are to
blame for the former negligence. Amazingly little theological reflection
has taken place in the past about an activity that takes up so much of
our time. The number of pages theologians have devoted to the question
of transubstantiation – which does or does not take place on Sunday –
for instance, would, I suspect, far exceed the number of pages devoted
to work that fills our live Monday through Saturday. My point is not to
belittle the importance of correct understanding of the real Presence of
Christ in the Lord’s Supper but to stress that a proper perspective on
human work is at least as important. ...

The post excerpts a few more paragraphs but you get the picture.

There have been a few scholars who have ventured into this territory Dr.
Witherington is talking about. Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens are two who
come to mind. But it really astounds me that virtually no one I talk to in the
church hierarchy or in the academy has the remotest interest in championing a
redress of this indifference. And yet I am thoroughly convinced that there
cannot be, and there empathically will not be, any renewal in the
church until large numbers of Christians come to see how the work and activities
of daily life connect with God's overarching mission in the world. All the
efforts to extract Christians out of the world into our evangelistic or social
justice programs will have no impact.

Thank you, Dr. Witherington, for tackling these issues. May the theological
tribe you spawn multiply and prosper.

Oct 22, 2012

The tide of brain drain – from developing countries to industrialized nations – has turned. Human capital is returning home to Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa, while some European professionals squeezed by the recession, turn toward developing countries for advancement.

Academics and college-educated engineers from Brazil to China to Poland
have long set off for the world's more developed nations for better
opportunities, sometimes in their own fields, often behind steering
wheels or in fast-food or restaurant kitchens.

But now that tide is turning; immigrants no longer always see developed countries as a better place to be. ...

... Emerging economies not only are faring better than most of the developed
world in the current recession, they also continue to grow, drawing
back their expatriates and, in some cases, even luring new high-skilled
citizens of the US and Europe.

It is the "democratization of talent," says Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.
"Everyone went to four or five English-speaking countries before, [and
all other nations] got the third-rung talent. Today, knowledge is no
longer monopolized anywhere." ...

... Benefits are not just measured in the individuals' skills or number of jobs generated but also in a host of ancillary benefits.

"When
you've lived in an OECD country and you see how things work there, I
would think you become less tolerant of a corruption, of things that
don't work, inefficiency, people sitting on their thumbs," says Georges
Lemaitre, an expert on workforce migration at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. "You want to see your own country with much more available services and with the efficiency that you are used to."

Such benefits, he adds, could become a global pattern in coming years, both from new migration and reverse migration.

In the meantime, those countries losing their allure could also lose their competitive edge. ...

Many have been inspired by Star Trek to become scientists, and some are starting to make its gadgetry a reality.

Destination Star Trek London has kicked off at the ExCeL exhibition centre,
and I'm willing to bet that among those heading down for a weekend of
pointy-eared fun, there'll be a high proportion of scientists and
engineers.

Many have been inspired by Star Trek to take up a career in science, technology or engineering.
I think the franchise deserves more respect as a science popularisation
medium – how many other prime-time TV shows would allow their
characters to toss out phrases like "I performed a Fourier analysis on
the harmonics, Captain"?

Since its inception in 1966, Star Trek
has familiarised us with the lingo and applications of science. At
least, that was the case for me. I felt pretty disenfranchised from
science at school: it wasn't until I discovered science fiction that I
realised I could understand "difficult" technical concepts.

Since
the show began, many of us have become more tech-savvy than we could
possibly have imagined at school. More than that, we're now seeing
emergent technology here on Earth that was once little more than a Star
Trek scriptwriter's dream. To get you in the mood for this weekend's
festivities, here's a roundup of some of the best Star Trek-inspired
technology.

Replicators - ... Three-dimensional printers have been on the open market commercially for most of the 21st century. ...

Nanites - ... They've constructed a set of nanorobots, with inbuilt chemical sensors, that can silence genes within cancerous cells. ...

Androids - Japanese scientists have created some remarkably human-looking androids,
though they wouldn't beat Data in a game of three-dimensional chess. ...

Of course, we all ready have personal communication devices. But as someone recently pointed out, while we all have communication devices, we don't see people in Star Trek constantly looking down at them and running into things. ;-) Warp drive would be pretty cool. Any other Trekkie devices that you want to see?

Having just stepped into
the shouting match over patents on genetically engineered crops, there
are a few small things that I, too, would like to get off my chest.

I say small things. I'm not talking about today's big hot issues: Whether genetically modified organisms — GMOs — should be labeled, or cause cancer in rats, or might improve the lives of poor farmers in Africa; none of that.

This
is about something simple: Seeds of GMOs. Various myths have grown up
around these seeds. Like most myths, they are inspired by reality. But
they've wandered off into the world of fiction.

Myth 1: Seeds from GMOs are sterile. ...

Myth 2: Monsanto will sue you for growing their patented GMOs if
traces of those GMOs entered your fields through wind-blown pollen. ...

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Struggling with shrinking attendance, some
churches are shortening their traditional Sunday service, promising to
get a generation with limited attention spans out the door in as little
as 30 minutes.

These abbreviated ceremonies are aimed at luring back the enormous
numbers of young people who avoid Sundays at church. With distractions
such as the Internet and a weak connection to the faith of their
childhoods, many are steering clear, to the dismay of religious leaders
who desperately want them back.

"We are increasingly aware of the time pressures on families, and
they have been telling us that the traditional service is too long,"
said the Rev. Chip Stokes of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Delray
Beach, Fla. "We recognize that things are changing, and we have to be
more adaptive without losing our core."

St. Paul's recently introduced a 30-minute service designed for
children up to fourth grade and their parents as an alternative to the
church's 90-minute traditional service. Stokes said he is thrilled with
attendance: About 40 parents and children have attended each week since
the service started in September. ...

This comment got my attention.

But not everyone supports the trend.

"The Lord gives us 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Karen
Turnbull of St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church in Delray Beach. "And
he's asking us for only one hour to come to church."

Uh, I don't think that was God asking. I think that was your tradition talking. The idea that if our one hour service was good enough for Peter and Paul, then it is good enough for us, is misguided. I doubt First Century Christians would recognize much of what we call traditional worship. I'm not making a case one way or the other for shorter services but let's not confuse "the way we've always done it" for a biblical mandate.

The church I attend has a slightly abbreviated service at 8:00 am that is 45 minutes long instead of one hour. I've wondered how it would work to have a couple of 30 minute services at times during the week other than on Sunday morning.

Does your congregation have shorter services? Short services outside of Sunday morning? What are the benefits and downsides of going with shorter services?

Oct 19, 2012

"Eight years ago, Jacqueline seemed like the ideal candidate for charity.
Struggling to provide, she had turned to a lifestyle of prostitution,
leaving her and her four children ostracized and vulnerable. Today, she
rejoices in her new life, saying, 'I used to have nothing to talk about,
but now I am able to praise God for everything.'"

"Science is full of surprises. Chemist Paul Edmiston's search for a new
way to detect explosives at airports, instead, led to the creation of
what's now called "Osorb," swellable, organically-modified silica, or
glass, capable of absorbing oil and other contaminants from water. Osorb
has become the principal product of a company in Wooster called
ABSMaterials, where Edmiston is now chief scientist. With support from
the National Science Foundation (NSF), Edmiston and his colleagues at
ABSMaterials are developing water remediation technologies for cities
and industries -- everything from storm water to agricultural runoff.
Municipal water systems and companies in several U.S. states and
Canadian provinces are using Osorb. ABSMaterials is creating formulas to
address various contaminants, including hydrocarbons, pharmaceuticals,
pesticides, herbicides, chlorinated solvents and endocrine disruptors."

... Grocery stores that found success on the internet are instead returning
to the physical world with a hybrid business model: the "virtual"
supermarket, a shop for smartphone users that carries photographs and
bar codes instead of food. After the success of locations in mass
transit stations from Seoul to Philadelphia, the virtual supermarket is about to hit the city above ground. Chinese supermarket giant Yihaodian announced this week it is opening 1,000 brick-and-mortar locations. ...

... Grocery stores want to reach time-starved commuters, but they also seem
to be capitalizing on consumers' desire to browse. It's one of the
reasons why many people at least claim to still prefer physical
bookstores, even as the monstrous success of websites like Amazon seem
to negate that notion.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Yihaodian has also experimented with
subway stores, but the announcement this week marks a big move back into
physical space. No longer will "virtual supermarkets" be only in mass
transit stations. They'll occupy actual retail space in the city.

Over at Gray, White, and Black, Jerry Park has posted an interesting piece based on Pew Research called Racial Religious Patterns in Political Ideology – Expanded Version. There are several interesting points in the post. Be sure to read it. But there is one chart in particular I wanted to lift up and I want to get your feedback on an interesting question. This is a chart showing the political party identification of non-Catholic Christians:

Being a PCUSA guy, you can guess where my eyes went first. The White Mainline group is the second most balanced group after the Asian American Mainline group (and it often surprises many people that Mainliners do tilt toward Republican.) But let's disaggregate the White Mainline group a little. Here is data taken from the 2011, Presbyterian Panel. of the Presbyterian Church, USA. The Panel is an going survey done by the denomination. Here is a breakdown of political identification within the denomination:

For members and ruling elder who identify with a party, the ratio is 3:2, Republicans over Democrats. The ratio for pastors is a 5:2 in favor of Democrats. The ratio is more than 5:1 for Democrats among specialized clergy. Part of what this says to me is that there are many pastors who find themselves with a substantial disconnect between themselves and their congregations, and vice versa.

I just completed eight years of service on the board of PCUSA's Presbyterian Mission Agency, which oversees the domestic and international work of the denomination between General Assemblies. I have had close involvement with staff and the countless boards and organizations that make up the denomination. (A rewarding experience, I might add.) I can affirm for you that the people who are in the PCUSA hierarchy are overwhelmingly in a continuum from moderate Democrats to flaming liberals. ;-)

As we look at the groups in the first chart, my perception is that the White Mainline group is unique in this dischotomy between members and leaders. There may be some differences between members and leaders in other groups but I wonder if there are any where the ratios are flipped.

So here is my question: Do you perceive that this difference between members and leaders is unique to White Mainline denominations? If so, why do you suppose the difference exists? (And just a caution. As we are dealing with politics AND religion, everyone play nice. ;-) )

Oct 18, 2012

Thirty years ago, Ben
Witherington III prayed for the energy to write a commentary on every
book of the New Testament. This he has done, in addition to writing
several other books, including a two-volume work of New Testament
theology and ethics. Now, at age 60, the prolific author and Asbury
Theological Seminary professor has turned his attention to activities
that make up, he says, "99 percent of people's ordinary lives." The
result is his latest release, The Rest of Life: Rest, Play, Eating, Studying, Sex from a Kingdom Perspective (Eerdmans). Rachel Marie Stone, author of the forthcoming Eat with Joy: Redeeming God's Gift of Food (InterVarsity), spoke with Witherington about the need for theological and ethical reflection on the everyday things of life.

Having written many scholarly volumes, why are you now turning your attention to the "ordinary" things of life?

There is very little serious theological reflection on the ordinary
Christian life: the things we do every day, like working, playing,
eating, or going to church. I wanted to ask, "What do these things look
like in the light of the coming kingdom of God? Where did God intend all
these things to go?" I wanted to somehow take a global view that would
work toward the integration of all these things in the mundane life:
keeping in balance work, worship, play, sex, and so forth. The aim was
to fill a gap in theological reflection.? ...

... What do you want readers to take away from this book?

What we are, and what we do in life, is tremendously important to God,
to the kingdom of God, and to ourselves. When we think about our
Christian faith and how we spend our work week, faith should not be
something that we do on Sunday, but something that shapes our worldview
and how we live.

So whether we eat, play, rest, go to a concert, or conjugate the word
"to love," it is all doxological, which is to say it's about giving
praise to God and preparing us for the kingdom. The question we should
ask about anything and everything is, Can I do this to the glory of God and the edification of others? If the answer is no, a Christian shouldn't do it. That's the ultimate ethical question.

I appreciate Ben Witherington's recent focus. I thought his recent book, Work: A Kingdom Perspective on Labor, was very helpful. I look forward to this new book. I hope his focusing on these topics will serve as legitimization for younger theologians to see this area of study as focus of study. There is still a huge gap between the worlds of theology and daily life, particularly work life.

Various groups of scientists have recently created thyroid cells in the lab, grown a new ear in the skin a woman's own arm, and won a Nobel Prize for figuring out how to reprogram cells so that they can turn into a variety of cell types.

In the future, there may be no limit to the kinds of organs and body parts that can be created from scratch.

One hope is to make donor organs obsolete, or at least far less
necessary, eliminating long waiting lists for transplants. By using a
patient's own cells, the new wave of regenerative medicine also
circumvents ethical arguments and reduces the chance that recipients
will reject their new parts.

"We now have the ability for the first time to create a virtually
unlimited supply of all the cell types and building blocks we need to
make what we want to make," said stem cell researcher Robert Lanza,
chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology, a biotechnology
company in Marlborough, Mass. "Now we just have to put it all together." ...

I first encountered Bob Lupton almost twenty-five years ago while in graduate school at Eastern University. Over the years, my appreciation for his insight into community/economic development has only grown. He has written two very important and engaging books in recent years that I recommend to everyone. First, is his book, Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life: Rethinking Ministry to the Poor. It offers important insights into destructive ideas we often have about poverty and the poor. Second, and my favorite, is his recent book, Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It). This book goes a little deeper into the same topics but also offers some important tips on how to improve our charitable impulses. I recommend it for every pastor and congregational leader.

Lupton also writes a monthly newsletter for FCS Urban Ministries called Urban Perspectives. I get it each month by email. In his October installment, Saving the World, he talks about the idealism of his youth and disappointments he encountered. Today, the church routinely organizes mission trips, especially for idealistic youth, that are marketed as opportunties to "help the poor." He writes of a woman named Alison who organizes mission trips to Haiti. She emailed him a few months. Lupton writes:

Alison from Colorado who coordinates mission trips to Haiti emailed me
recently with these very questions. She was painfully aware that the
service her volunteers performed was largely make-work and their
suitcases stuffed with free gifts only perpetuated a hands-out mentality
among Haitians. She asked for my advice.

Here is Lupton's response. If his response resonates with you, then I highly recommend you get a copy of Toxic Charity and begin thinking about new ways we can do this work better.

I understand the demand to do mission trips and the pressure you
feel to continue planning them. Here are a few suggestions that may
make them more redemptive.

Exposing young people (and adults) to the needs of the world and
the amazing work of God in harsh environments is important ministry. It
opens their eyes, stirs their hearts and draws them into compassionate
action. That’s why mission trips can be important in the spiritual
development of our youth. And that’s what mission trips should be about –
spiritual development, not pretending that they are about saving the
world. Not immediately anyway. They are about saving us. Preparing us. Once that is clear, we can venture into Haiti and other places of need with integrity.

We go to learn, not to save. The mindset of learners is very
different from that of servers. Learners listen to others, servers do
for others. Learners ask questions, servers offer answers. Learners
marvel at the faith of the poor, servers pity the poor. Learners see
ingenuity, servers see poverty. Learners affirm the worth of people,
servers diminish their dignity. You see where I am going with this?

So how do we structure a mission trip that appeals to the innate
desire to make a difference in the world, an experience that deepens the
spiritual lives of our youth but doesn’t create false expectations?
And of course, is truly helpful. First of all, our marketing has to
have integrity. The trip is primarily about us, not them.
And that’s OK. This is an insight trip to expand our spiritual
horizons, see how faith works when resources are severely limited,
discover how God is at work among culturally and theologically diverse
people. Such insights can be transformative. They can become the very
catalysts that ignite a ministry calling.

Secondly, we are not on a mission to help the poor by
distributing suitcases full of give-away’s or performing meaningless
make-work or assuming roles that can better be handled by locals. We do
not promote beggary. We engage in exchange – economic as well as
interpersonal. We enjoy the hospitality that is extended by our hosts,
and we contribute to their economy by participating in the legitimate
enterprise of tourism through fair payment for food, lodging , local
transportation and preparation time. And we buy their products.

Thirdly, we prepare our youth for the learning experience by reading books on effective service (like Toxic Charity and When Helping Hurts)
and articles on the country, the history and contemporary issues.
Learning the language honors people, at least some key phrases.
“Appreciative inquiry” techniques, note-taking and journaling can also
be useful. Regular group reflection times during and following the trip
will help youth assimilate and internalize what they are experiencing.

It goes without saying that on-the-ground connections with
seasoned, in-country practitioners is essential to understand the
context, scope and impact of the work. Visiting with several different
ministries will broaden the perspective. They are the ones who can
arrange discussions with residents as well as fun – like a soccer game
with local teens. They will be relieved that they don’t have to set up
work projects for your group. Remember, their mission is not to be tour
guides. Generous compensation for the valuable time they spend with your
group hosting and coordinating schedules would be most appropriate.

Hope this is useful.

Bob

Does this resonate with you? What would you think about dropping the name "mission trip" for "insight trip"?

Last month I published a post "predicting" a tie in the electoral college vote. (My 2012 Electoral College Prediction) On MSNBC's Daily Rundown this morning Chuck Todd had an interesting piece on the possibility of an tie in the Electoral College. I see that Intrade gives a 5% chance of a tie, that is 1 in 20.

A 25 vote swing toward Romney would create s a tie. Virginia (13 votes) has the narrowest margin for Obama at .8%. Let's give that to Romney. That gives us 281-257.

The remaining states with the narrowest margins (between 2% and 3%) for Obama are: Iowa (6), Nevada (6), Ohio (18), and Wisconsin (10). Give Obama Ohio and Wisconsin (28 votes). Give Romney Iowa and Nevada (12 votes). You get 269-269. (Todd started with a different map but this scenario is the one he also deemed most likely to happpen.)

The electoral votes are opened and counted in early January by the sitting vice president (Biden) in front of the newly installed House of Representatives. The 12th Amendment says that if no majority exists, then the House will elect a president from the top three candidates. But the House vote is done by the 50 state delegations not by the inidividual 435 members. Repbulicans have a sizeable majority of state delegations. Romney would be elected president.

However, if no vice-presidential candidate has a majority, then the Senate elects a vice-president from the two candidates recieving the most votes. In this case, election is by the 100 individual senators, not by state delegations. Polls at Real Clear Politics give Democrats a 52-48 edge in the new senate. If there is a 50-50 split in the newly installed senate, then the sitting vice-president (Joe Biden at that point) casts the deciding vote. Would the Senate elect Biden even if the House elects Romney?

But the scenarios get even messier. Going back to first map, lets assume that Romney does not get Virginia but instead transfers only Ohio (18 votes) and New Hampshire (4 votes) to his column. Then Obama wins 270-268, right? Not so fast. Nebraska and Maine do not have a winner-takes-all system for electoral votes. Now we have this story: Poll: Romney five points ahead of Obama in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. If this one vote goes to Romney, we are at a 269-269 tie.

Further complicating matters, is the faithless elector scenario. A faithless elector is someone who fails to cast their vote in the way they were pledged to vote. So imagine a couple of Republican electors are disgruntled Ron Paul supporters who vote for Obama, giving Obama the win or causing a tie. There have been six faithless electors in the last fifty years. I imagine the court cases filed in response faithless electors would dwarf the events of the 2000 election.

Now, imagine all of this in the middle of confronting the looming fiscal cliff! Certainly 20:1 odds aren't very good, but it is better than what we typically see. Wouldn't the chaos be fun?! Maybe I need to start a new Facebook page: Americans for a Tie. ;-)

Oct 17, 2012

Advocates of 'vertical farming' say growing crops in urban high-rises will eventually be both greener and cheaper.

Want to see where your food might come from in the future? Look up.

The seeds of an agricultural revolution are taking root in cities
around the world—a movement that boosters say will change the way that
urbanites get their produce and solve some of the world's biggest
environmental problems along the way.

It's called vertical farming, and it's based on one simple principle:
Instead of trucking food from farms into cities, grow it as close to
home as possible—in urban greenhouses that stretch upward instead of
sprawling outward.

The idea is flowering in many forms. There's the 12-story triangular
building going up in Sweden, where plants will travel on tracks from the
top floor to the bottom to take advantage of sunlight and make
harvesting easier. Then there's the onetime meatpacking plant in Chicago
where vegetables are grown on floating rafts, nourished by waste from
nearby fish tanks. And the farms dotted across the U.S. that hang their
crops in the air, spraying the roots with nutrients, so they don't have
to bring in soil or water tanks for the plants.

However vertical farming is implemented, advocates say the immediate
benefits will be easy to see. There won't be as many delivery trucks
guzzling fuel and belching out exhaust, and city dwellers will get
easier access to fresh, healthy food.

Looking further, proponents say vertical farming could bring even bigger
and more sweeping changes. Farming indoors could reduce the use of
pesticides and herbicides, which pollute the environment in agricultural
runoff. Preserving or reclaiming more natural ecosystems like forests
could help slow climate change. And the more food we produce indoors,
the less susceptible we are to environmental crises that disrupt crops
and send prices skyrocketing, like the drought that devastated this
year's U.S. corn crop. ...

Email, like paper letters delivered by horseback, has become an unproductivity tool and may just be the biggest time killer in the modern workplace. Here's where companies are headed next. ...

So what's the solution? Our idea: Turn email into a conversation. Get
rid of the inbox. Build an online platform where departments can post
and respond to messages on central discussion threads, Facebook-style.
Then integrate that with Twitter and Facebook so great ideas can be
broadcast--with a click--to the world. Conversations
isn’t a revolutionary concept; it’s a duh-it’s-about-time concept. And
it’s worked for us and 5 million clients. A year from now, we may well
be reading email its last rites. Here’s why:

Email has become an unproductivity tool. Right now, the typical corporate user spends 2 hours and 14 minutes every day reading and responding to email ...

Email is linear, not collaborative. Email was never intended for collaborative work. ...

Email is not social. Email is where good ideas go to die. ...

Your inbox is a black hole. You may be able to quickly and easily search your inbox, but odds are the rest of your department or company can’t. ...

Dalrymple highlights the popular perception that the mixing
of politics and religion is something unique to the Republican Party. He makes
the case that Obama has actually been quite willing to mix the two over the
course of his presidency, and actually it is Romney who is more reticent to bring up religion, due
largely to the challenge his Mormon faith presents. Read the first several
paragraphs for yourself and see what you think but I thought his analysis of
how we got to where we are was especially good.

So where do people get this notion that the Right has claimed ownership over
Christianity? It’s best understood historically. And while there are
certainly points in this story on which to criticize the Right, the story has
just as much to do with poor decisions on the Left. If it came to seem as
though the Right owned the Christian camp in the ongoing political warfare
between the parties, it was largely because the Left completely abandoned the
religious field.

Jeffrey’s Bell’s The Case for a Polarized Politics tells
the story in far greater detail than I can hope to do here. But in the
late 1960s and 1970s, the Democratic party came to represent the rejection — in
fact, it was quite explicit — of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Democratic National Conventions were awash in anti-Christian sentiment,
as that tradition came to represent all that was oppressive and backwards, the
decrepit authority of a prior generation that was best case aside in the mark
toward the new utopia. Religion was essentially privatized. Believe
whatever (nonsense) you want in the privacy of your own home, but religious
convictions, passions and persuasion do not belong in the public, political
sphere.

Also, since this was (not coincidentally) the same group that was
promoting the sexual revolution and its transformation of personal mores,
cultural forms and social policy, the Religious Right arose and, increasingly
in the late 1970s made common cause with the GOP. On one issue after
another — prayer in schools, artifacts and invocations of faith in the
political sphere, the enforced teaching of evolution and sex education,
abortion, pornography, marriage and eventually gay rights — the Left lined up
on the side opposite the Christian consensus. Evangelicals briefly
believed they might have a Democrat they could support in the born-again Jimmy
Carter, but they quickly grew disenchanted with Carter and fully cast their lot
with the GOP in 1980.

However, what was initially a temporary alliance forged to address specific
issues that concerned Christians as Christians, became a more complex and
thoroughgoing union. …

He goes on to point out that a pragmatic alliance with Republicans morphed
into a thorough fusion. This alienated many people and robbed the church
of its prophetic voice. But he writes:

As a historical matter, the extreme alignment of Christians and the Right
might never have happened if the Left had not abandoned the field. As it
was, the Right was the only side making a religious pitch. Both sides
should have been making a religious pitch. The Left has been
reemphasizing the use of values and religious language, and when it’s not
artificial and manipulative I actually appreciate that. We need
Christians arguing both sides.

And then he writes this, which I could easily have written myself:

While I tend to vote conservative, it’s my responsibility as a Christian to
examine each issue on its own merits according to my principles and my beliefs.
I feel no loyalty to the Republican Party. In fact, I fear
that feeling of loyalty because I fear it would cloud my judgment. My
loyalty is to something much greater, and that greater loyalty will sometimes
call me to criticize the Republican Party. I need to be able to deliver
that criticism.

Then he concludes:

What we require is not less religion in politics, but better religion in
politics. We require a religion in politics that is not reflexively
partisan (and now that problem is just as acute amongst progressive Christians
on the Left as it ever was amongst conservative Christians on the Right).
We require more thoughtful ways of bringing the fullness of who we are,
religious vision included, into the political arena. We require the kind
of faith in politics that will hold us accountable to be humble and honest and
searching and serving, that will hold the state accountable to use the power of
the sword and the power of the public purse wisely and justly, and that will
hold the church accountable to speak with a greater regard for the truth than
for political power.

“Reflexive partisanship.” To me, that is the virus that has diminished the
church’s voice in culture. It is epidemic. And it continues to spread through the body ... right, left, and in between.

Oct 16, 2012

The genetically modified mouse is five hundred times more sensitive to the smell of explosive than a normal mouse.

Scientists have genetically modified mice to enable them to sniff out
landmines. They hope the GM mouse, known as MouSensor, could one day
become a useful tool to help deal with the dangerous legacies of past
wars.

More than 70 countries are contaminated by landmines, a
constant reminder of previous conflicts. "Long after wars have ended,
communities are still impeded from going back to their normal, daily
activities because of all these mines still affecting their land," said
Charlotte D'Hulst of Hunter College, New York, who led the team that
developed the MouSensor.

One approach to clearing landmines is to use HeroRats, giant pouched rats that are trained to sniff out landmines by the Belgian NGO, Apopo.

Two
of these, with a human handler, can clear an area of 300 sq metres in
less than two hours. It would take two people about two days to do the
same. One disadvantage of the HeroRats system, however, is that the rats
need nine months' training before they are ready for landmine
detection. ...

Am I the only one who finds this a little wierd? Who goes to be bed at night and thinks, "Gee. I wonder if I could breed bomb-sniffing rodents?" I suspect the mice would appreciate some GM that would improve feline detection faculties.

Seriously, I don't have a problem with this particular application of GM but just think of the moral and ethical implications this is going to have has we begin to tinker with humans.

Unfriending, blocking and ignoring: Political spats on Facebook affect real-life relationships with family, friends, colleagues and neighbors as the 2012 Election Day battle between Obama and Romney draws near.

12:25PM EDT October 13. 2012 - Jason Perlow thought it was just a spirited debate.

A
friend posted some negative information about presidential candidate
Mitt Romney on Facebook, and Perlow, who considers himself a moderate,
pointed out what he saw as flaws in that commentary.

That online disagreement escalated into an offline disintegration of their more-than-10-year friendship.

"He
got really angry with me," says Perlow, 43. "He defriended me on
Facebook and told me not to send him any more e-mails. He also
defriended my wife, who had nothing to do with it."

Most people
know the social dangers of discussing politics at family gatherings,
cocktail parties and the workplace. But the rise of Facebook brings
about a tempting -- and treacherous -- territory to engage in such
commentary.

It takes just a few posts to inadvertently damage a
friendship, put a rift in family relations, alienate a once-friendly
neighbor or infurIate a colleague. ...

... Yet as divisive as those Facebook comments can be, they can have an influence.

One
in six social network users say they've changed their views about a
political issue after discussing it or reading posts about it on a
social networking site, according to a Pew Research Center survey
fielded in January and February. ...

I have never defriended anyone over politics but I have
moved some people into friend groups where I can avoid them more easily when I
wish. I unfollowed six people on twitter in recent months because of their
incessant divisive political tweets, especially during the primary debates. The
majority have been pastors or academics, including one person who has published
several books and has a wide following. Her occasional barrage of tweets, especially during primary campaigns, were so
obnoxious that I am no longer prepared to hear much of what she has to
say about anything else. From retweets by others this fall I see little has
changed.

I’m particularly puzzled by the number of religious leaders who
routinely go to excess in social media. (And let’s face it, most of us who post
regularly occasionally step across a line.) Most pastors I have known have been
very judicious about making political remarks in face-to-face community. They
would never say things from the pulpit or at a public gathering that they say
in social media. Bruce Reyes-Chow wrote a post recently, An Open Letter to
Pastors About the Dangers of Using Social Media. One of the dangers he lists is
the “Here I can be the real me” mindset. He writes:

This is probably the most difficult aspect of online life to
manage for a pastor. I understand the need for a place to vent, but as a
general rule I advise you to never to vent online and when unsure, default to,
“If you can’t say it out loud and in public, don’t say it online.” because you
just never knows who is tracking what, who taking screenshots for future use or
who will eventually see what is said. Again, I do see how safe online space can
be beneficial, but you risk much when intentionally compartmentalizing yourself
into two or more personas. I choose to believe that most thoughtful folks in a
church, even if they saw some venting, would be able to understand. But what I
would not want is for people to see your online life and experience a completely
different person. For generations we pastors have been told to live two
separate lives, church pastor and real person, and this has only lead to
trouble. We feel confined, churches feel lied to and our unhealthy and
destructive behaviors can be hidden from view. Social media has the capability
to draw us into the same kinds of unhealthy dualities that can lead to broken
relationships, congregational disillusionment and pastoral misconduct, so we
must be even more diligent in how we live online.

Bruce’s post help clarify for me why I might be seeing so
many pastors behave this way. But there is more here. Bruce is writing about
pastors but I think his wisdom applies to anyone who wants to live a truly
authentic life.

Oct 15, 2012

... Yet if Wadhwa is right the student debt problem will take care of
itself—at least as it relates to the next generation and those that
follow. Online courses will proliferate to such a degree that acquiring
knowledge will become totally free. There will still be a cost
associated with getting a formal degree. But most universities, he says,
“will be in the accreditation business.” They will monitor and sanction
coursework; teachers will become mentors and guides, not deliver
lectures and administer tests. This model has the potential to
dramatically cut the cost of an education and virtually eliminate the
need to borrow for one, he says.

This isn’t an argument that Thiel was ready to entertain. His focus
is on skipping college altogether unless you can get into a top-tier
school and are certain to enter a highly paid field. He believes we are
experiencing a “psycho-social” bubble in higher education. Everyone
believes they have to have a college degree and so they will borrow and
pay any amount to get one from any school.

Most families view a college degree as insurance; something they can
buy to guarantee that they do not fall through society’s cracks, Thiel
says. But what they are really buying is “a dunce hat in disguise”
because employers have less respect than ever for a degree that comes
from a second-tier university. Such a degree, in Thiel’s view, brands a
graduate as mediocre.

Summers, a former president of Harvard, agrees that higher education is
in transition. But he thinks Thiel is “badly wrong” about his bubble
theory and that Wadhwa is severely underestimating the value of the
total university experience. The gap between what college graduates and
high school graduates earn is only widening, which speaks to the
continuing value of a college degree—no matter what it costs. And, says
Summers, “If you think higher education is expensive, try ignorance.”...

... For his part, Wadhwa allows that there will always be students able and
willing to pay for a traditional college experience and for them it will
be a worthwhile investment. But for the vast majority, from a financial
standpoint that kind of education makes no sense and is fast becoming
unnecessary. He believes the higher education revolution is coming soon
and will happen fast—perhaps fast enough to keep the next generation
from finishing school with debts they may never be able to pay.

Ever hear something like this? "Obama is going to make
America a socialist country like those Europeans." or "We need a more
just economic system like they have in Europe." Whenever discussions of
economic systems arise in the U. S., somehow we always seem to be doing
comparisons to “Europe.” I write Europe in quotes because there is no European
economic system. There are nearly four dozen countries in Europe. The economies
of the United Kingdom, Russia, Greece, Germany, France, and Sweden vary widely.
But when I hear Americans get more specific I typically hear them reference the
Nordic economic model (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) with
Sweden being the poster child.

I don’t consider comparative economics my strong suit but I
do try to read up on different economic systems. As I listen to both left and
right employ Sweden in their debates, I do wonder if pundits on either side
have really looked at what has happened in Sweden in the past fifty years.

Recently I came across and article, A Swedish Lesson For
Ed Balls, written by conservative Swedish economist Anders Aslund. I don’t
know much about him. From what I do know, I’m not sure I would entirely agree
with him on economic issues, but I think he does a good job of capturing the
shifts in Swedish policy over recent decades. I think most Americans, left and
right, are about twenty years behind the curve in the perceptions of the Nordic
economic model, with Sweden of the 1970s and 1980s frozen in their minds as our present reality. Aslund
begins his article in the Salisbury Review:

To Brits, Sweden with its tightly regulated
social welfare state is often a byword for socialism. But in the last two
decades the country has been transformed. today it offers a flexible and
dynamic European model with ever falling public expenditure, lower taxes,
economic growth and budget surpluses.

After many years of
absence from the Swedish debate, I attended a conference on the Swedish economy
in the southern city of Malmö in May, organized by Swedbank. The 180 speakers
represented the full range of Swedish views, which have moved amazingly far to
the free-market right, not least social democrats and trade union leaders. Key
values are competition, openness and efficiency, while social and environmental
values remain. The idea is not to abolish social welfare but to make it more
efficient through competition among private providers. A new consensus has
emerged on having a social welfare society rather than a social welfare state. ...

Read the whole piece. It may challenge your perceptions. If
you are Swedish are have intimate knowledge of the Swedish system, I’d be
interested in hearing your take on Aslund’s claims.

A new form of radical centrist politics is needed to tackle inequality without hurting economic growth

... Does inequality really need to be tackled? The twin forces of
globalisation and technical innovation have actually narrowed inequality
globally, as poorer countries catch up with richer ones. But within
many countries income gaps have widened. More than two-thirds of the
world’s people live in countries where income disparities have risen
since 1980, often to a startling degree. In America the share of
national income going to the top 0.01% (some 16,000 families) has risen
from just over 1% in 1980 to almost 5% now—an even bigger slice than the
top 0.01% got in the Gilded Age.

It is also true that some measure of inequality is good for an
economy. It sharpens incentives to work hard and take risks; it rewards
the talented innovators who drive economic progress. Free-traders have
always accepted that the more global a market, the greater the rewards
will be for the winners. But as our special report this week argues, inequality has reached a stage where it can be inefficient and bad for growth.

That is most obvious in the emerging world. In China credit is
siphoned to state-owned enterprises and well-connected insiders; the
elite also gain from a string of monopolies. In Russia the oligarchs’
wealth has even less to do with entrepreneurialism. In India, too often,
the same is true.

In the rich world the cronyism is better-hidden. One reason why Wall
Street accounts for a disproportionate share of the wealthy is the
implicit subsidy given to too-big-to-fail banks. From doctors to
lawyers, many high-paying professions are full of unnecessary
restrictive practices. And then there is the most unfair transfer of
all—misdirected welfare spending. Social spending is often less about
helping the poor than giving goodies to the relatively wealthy. In
America the housing subsidy to the richest fifth (through
mortgage-interest relief) is four times the amount spent on public
housing for the poorest fifth.

Even the sort of inequality produced by meritocracy can hurt growth.
If income gaps get wide enough, they can lead to less equality of
opportunity, especially in education. Social mobility in America,
contrary to conventional wisdom, is lower than in most European
countries. The gap in test scores between rich and poor American
children is roughly 30-40% wider than it was 25 years ago. And by some
measures class mobility is even stickier in China than in America.

Some of those at the top of the pile will remain sceptical that
inequality is a problem in itself. But even they have an interest in
mitigating it, for if it continues to rise, momentum for change will
build and may lead to a political outcome that serves nobody’s
interests. Communism may be past reviving, but there are plenty of other
bad ideas out there.

Hence the need for a True Progressive agenda. Here is our suggestion,
which steals ideas from both left and right to tackle inequality in
three ways that do not harm growth. ...

Suggested remedies include attacking monopolies and vested interests (whether on Wall Street or state-owned enterprises), school reform that offers more choices, reforming labor laws and residency restrictions in some countries, refocusing social welfare toward the young and poor instead of the old and rich, and reform the tax system, particularly by eliminating subsidies and deductions that go to the wealthy. As the adage goes, the devil is in the details, but I think the general thrust of ideas is correct.

On average, the Biblical world sees a startling new discovery of
allegedly cosmic significance every four or five years. Most recently,
we had Jesus's Wife, with the Gospel of Judas not long before that, and
no great powers of prophecy are needed to tell that other similar finds
will shortly be upon us.

In themselves, the finds are usually interesting (if they happen to
be authentic), but where the media always go wrong in reporting them is
in vastly exaggerating just how novel and ground-breaking they are.

So powerful are such claims, and so consistent, that it sometimes
seems as if nobody before the 1970s (say) could have known about the
multiple alternative Christianities that flourished in the first
centuries of Christianity. Surely, we think, earlier generations could
never have imagined the world revealed by such ancient texts as the Gospel of Thomas,
and the Gnostic documents that turned up at Nag Hammadi. Lacking such
evidence, how could older scholars have dreamed what we know to be true
today: the vision of Jesus as a Zen-like mystic teacher, or perhaps a
Buddhist-style enlightener, who expounded secret doctrines to leading
female disciples, and who may even have been sexually involved with one
or more of them? Today, for the first time, we hear the heretics
speaking in their own voices!

But here's the problem. Virtually nothing in that model would have
surprised a reasonably well-informed reader in 1930, or even in 1900,
never mind in later years. In order to make their finds more appealing,
more marketable, scholars and journalists have to work systematically to
obscure that earlier knowledge, to pretend that it never existed. In
order to create the maximum impact, the media depend on a constructed
amnesia, a wholly fictitious picture of the supposed ignorance of
earlier decades. ...

... People being what they are, I know that situation won't change any
time soon. But can I at least make a minimum demand? If you are going to
claim a new gospel fragment as a revolutionary scholarly breakthrough,
can you at least demonstrate that it significantly advances the state of
knowledge beyond what existed in the era of Herbert Hoover?

Oct 12, 2012

“How did he get on this committee?” she asked. Several years
ago I was sitting with a friend as we looked over the names of people who had
been assigned to committees of an upcoming Presbyterian General Assembly.
Committee members were assigned (and I believe still are) randomly by a
computer program. As we scanned the names of the committee members that would be
dealing with an especially controversial topic, we discovered the name of a person
who was widely known to be a vocal advocate for one side of the controversy, the
opposite side from my friend. “How did he get on this committee? It’s so
obvious they stacked the deck against us.”

Then, not three minutes later, we were looking at the names for another committee that was also had been assigned controversial business. On
the list was man who my friend knew well and she knew he as was a strong voice for the
position she supported. She remarked, “Truly it was God’s hand that put him
on that committee.”

... Confirmation
bias is a member of the family of cognitive biases that inhabit our
brains. Cognitive biases are instances of evolved mental behavior. They
resemble mental shortcuts that have evolved in our brains over time. Our
collective confirmation biases impact how we think and how we process
information. They impact how we make decisions. Sometimes they can lead
us astray.

Confirmation
bias creates in people a tendency to favor information that confirms
their beliefs or hypotheses. It causes us to selectively seek out and
interpret information that supports our own conclusions and beliefs.

In
other words, if you are a Republican, you will inherently gravitate to
candidates, literature and programming that support your position.
Democrats do the same thing. Of concern to me lately, though, is that
the bias in our news media seems to be exploiting our confirmation
biases. This, in turn, contributes to the polarization of American
politics. ...

...In my view, our news media and
television in particular have learned to make money by preying on our
confirmation biases. Hardcore Republicans watch Fox News. Hardcore
Democrats watch MSNBC. Driven by confirmation biases, viewers lock into
the news programming that most reflects their own conclusions and
judgments. Conservatives may view Fox as their only alternative to the
otherwise biased liberal media, but nonetheless, they are still watching
Fox. Many I know watch it all the time.

The networks seem to have decided that
if our confirmation biases attract us to news that supports our beliefs,
they might as well give it to us. If our perspective is supported all
the time, we will stay tuned. All they need to do is pick a side and
stick with the story. That equates to loyal viewers, which increases
advertising revenue for the network. It also may equate to lousy,
borderline anti-social “news” broadcasts. But given the financial
realities of the world in which we live, it should come as no surprise
that this is occurring. ...

...One would think this would contribute
to the polarization of our society, and in fact, it does. One of the
effects of confirmation bias is “attitude” or “belief” polarization. As
we unknowingly pursue and interpret information in a manner consistent
with our beliefs, our positions become more polarized. The de-evolution
of the news media from responsible journalism to biased reporting has no
doubt contributed to the polarized, uncompromising nature of our
electorate.

Our cognitive biases are exploited by
the Internet, too. If you are a politically active person with strong
opinions on politics, ask yourself whether your inbox contains any
messages from individuals whose perspectives differ from your own. All
of the mass-forwarded emails that assault our computers every day take a
toll on our perspective. They contribute to belief polarization....

This paragraph is important.

... None of us, of course, is immune from confirmation bias. We all have it.
The best we can do is be aware of it and try to combat it. We need to
demand more from our news sources. We need to actively seek out
information that supports views different than our own, and seriously
consider it. We need to change the channel more often. ...

I've heard that the deeper into confirmation bias we
go, the more a physiological change begins to happen. Supposedly, as we find
confirmation for our views about controversial issues, endorphins are released.
Incessant searching for confirmation can become a type of addiction.
Supposedly, when we encounter information that counters our view, cortisol gets
dumped into the system, motivating us to avoid such encounters (or to have such
encounters in anticipation of an endorphin generated high coming from
vanquishing an enemy).

Whether
or not the physiological consequences are all that strong, it is clear to me
that confirmation bias is a powerful influence. We all do it. (If you think you
don't, then you aren't being fully honest with yourself.) It is a natural and
useful process enabling us to cope with a world that is vastly more complex
than our limited human faculties are capable of processing. And that suggests a
few things to me.

First,
when it comes to seeing confirmation bias evidenced in others, especially in
opponents, I need to chill out. If ever Jesus's instruction to take the log out
of my own eye before getting a speck out of our brother's eye applied, it is
here. Compounding the confirmation bias evidenced in my sister or brother is my
own smug confidence that I never err in this way. Maybe each time I begin to
engage others when I see ugly forms of confirmation bias evidenced, I should
see this as a spiritual discipline, prompting me to examine and repent of my
own biases before I engage.

Second, I
probably need to embrace the fact that, to a degree, confirmation bias is a
natural and necessary part of being human. But I also need to be on my guard
from seeking out confirmation simply to make me more secure or to reinforce my
disdain for others. I need to be aware of those who have something to profit
(political power? self-affirmation? TV ratings?) by helping me confirm my bias.

Finally,
confirmation bias can also be a way of developing community, reinforcing
community with those who share my bias over and against those who do not. Yet
somebody once suggested, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate
you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you." Love isn't
about having warm fuzzies. It's about seeking the good of the other, especially
people I don't like. I suspect one of the biggest remedies to excessive
confirmation bias is to resolutely stay in community with those how don't share
my bias, and ponder what good I can do for them.

Much like snowflakes, no two people seem to react to a good scare the same way. Nightmares Fear Factory in Niagara Falls, Canada,
illustrates this point by taking a picture of people at a particularly
terrifying moment in their haunted house. It is unknown what exactly
they're looking at - but it's obviously pretty scary.

Here are three samples:

Upon further investigation, we now know what these people were looking at. These folks actually were not in the huanted house. The were waiting in line to enter. Someone had left on a big screeen TV at the entry and they were watching this: